The broadcaster’s disinformation and social media correspondent spends her time pursuing trolls and dismantling conspiracy theories. In return she is abused, slandered, threatened. She talks about battling cranks, extremists – and Elon Musk
n my way into Broadcasting House, the BBC’s London HQ, I saw some graffiti on the building – “BBC Covid Liars”. I had just finished Marianna Spring’s most recent podcast, Marianna in Conspiracyland, and there was something neat and droll about seeing its proposition in real life: Covid hoaxers are real and they are alive with their own righteousness. Not only that, but theis at the centre of their theorising – the supposed public service broadcaster brainwashing the people of the UK.
‘I don’t like the way that online abuse spills over into offline action’ … Covid conspiracy theorists stuck posters of Spring’s face to the BBC headquarters.Spring is an extremely energetic, personable young woman. In a screwball comedy about a newsroom, she would be the one described as a dynamo. She is screen-ready – her earrings match her necklace, which matches her trousers, which match her shoes – but seems completely without vanity, the way athletes do.
Their persistence, though, only makes her more stubborn. “The more they do that to me, the more determined I am to keep on doing what I do. Because the more violent and extreme the rhetoric becomes, the more important it is that I expose it.” She came to specialise in the investigative field and disinformation through the first news event she can remember: 9/11 happened when she was at primary school, in year one. “I remember being collected by my mum; she said some people had flown planes into these buildings. I could not get my head around the idea that this was not an accident. Six-year-old me could not understand how a plane gets flown into a building on purpose.
Well, yes, up to a point. “I don’t want to sound like your mum”, I start, before swerving to, “I don’t want to sound too Guardian”, but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the BBC in all this, allowing one woman to become the face of everything extremists hate about the institution and all it stands for. The BBC is brilliant and she is very well protected, she says.
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